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He realizes, too late, that the hammer’s swing is going to collide directly with his face. He’s unable to even flinch, much less dodge , before the rattle of metal hitting metal vibrates through his skull, imploding his eardrums last. It’s why it takes him a full minute to realize that the impact has knocked his mask clear off of his face. When his vision clears the first thing he notices is the color has drained from Jayce’s healthy visage. The Defender of Tomorrow mouths two syllables that Viktor vaguely guesses through the headache to be his name.
He watches Jayce’s throat bob to avoid the look in his eyes. The look that says that somewhere in the golden boy’s puppy-dog heart there’s still more than an ounce of affection for his former partner. Which would be one blow too many for his coward’s heart. Distantly, he registers Jayce’s voice. His eyes flicker to familiar lips. He’s been chewing on them.
“They told me you were—“
“Mad?” he bites out, voice alight with the hint of the mania fluttering in his chest like a bird. “Evil? A violation of their precious Ethos?”
“Dead. They told me you were dead.”
Jayce tears his eyes away from Viktor, casting his face in shadows. He’s still so damn statuesque. The Machine Herald has nothing to say for a moment, watching his nemesis of several months pretend not to cry into his sleeve, furiously brushing away tears as they appear. All of this time, he had assumed that it was Jayce’s anger over their failed partnership that had fueled his every strike. That the complete lack of grief on his bared face—he’d often pondered how asinine it was that Jayce would forgo a mask—had been due to him no longer caring for Viktor.
Jayce takes more than a minute to recover. The ringing in Viktor’s head fades slowly and eventually his eyes focus enough to see Jayce turn and look at him. When Viktor meets Jayce’s gaze he can feel every time the man’s hammer has struck him with a distinct clarity. But his former partner’s expression is more than enough to send a stab of grief through his still-beating, human heart.
“I see.”
“Why?”
Viktor tilts his head, “I can see why it would be difficult for you?”
“No, why ? Why are you the Machine Herald?”
Oh, that. “You saw firsthand how weak and inefficient my parts were. Certainly you can see the value in replacing them.”
Jayce gets a look of righteous indignation in his eyes, the kind that usually warns that a flurry of blows or a shockwave blast is headed his way. Viktor represses his urge to shiver. “That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it! Why are you experimenting on humans?”
“Because they asked me to,” He cocks an eyebrow, “people here can’t afford to go without an arm or a leg when their labor is all that’s putting dinner on their children’s table. My neural implants allow them to work harder, longer, and without anxiety. Is it really so difficult to see they might choose this for themselves?”
“…”
“Does that hurt to hear, Defender?”
Jayce looks stricken. “Don’t call me that. Please.”
“You’ve had no qualms before.”
“I didn’t know it was you before.”
“I find that difficult to believe.”
If he could hear Jayce’s heart crack in two, he’s sure it would echo around them in the street now. His former partner looks like he’s about to lose his lunch. Viktor is sick of the pity party. With a single thought he readies the Hex Claw and takes aim. Jayce eyes him warily, white-knuckled fingers instinctively pulling the hammer defensively across his chest.
“Viktor,” he says, “I don’t want to fight you.”
“You’ve already fought me, O Man of Progress, so kill whatever weak version of me you have in your head. Does it embarrass you? Viktor the cripple so easily running circles around Piltover’s hero?”
“Stop it, V, don’t call yourself th–”
As though punishing Jayce for the nickname, he fires the Hex Claw. He usually pulls his punches with Jayce, avoids spraying that laser stream against anything vital or irreplaceable. It was a little weakness of his, something he hadn’t been able to excise despite his best efforts. Jayce–after all–certainly did not hold back in a similar way. But when Viktor saw his face, saw those hazel eyes that could look at a person so softly it ached, he couldn’t help but aim his laser a little lower, to push him back with gravity traps and shields and environmental hazards instead.
He’s not doing that this time.
He aims the spray of the Hex Claw directly over Jayce’s knuckles, intending to sever his fingers. Jayce fumbles the button that turns on his hammer’s shields, too slow, taking an uninhibited ray of magma across his right hand (his dominant, of course) before an expulsion of energy pushes the laser back. Jayce lets out a howl that will likely haunt his dreams for months. With his right hand Viktor carefully pushes the button to activate his neural inhibitor, which promptly pushes down how he feels about that. He shrugs off the guilt like an animal shedding water.
The Defender clutches his injured hand under his left armpit, staring at Viktor like he truly has gone mad as he struggles to hold the giant hammer one-handed. Stupid. His designs were always too superfluous for actual practical use. Pretty and useless, just like everything in Piltover.
Viktor isn’t finished. He springs forward, tossing a gravity trap at his enemy’s feet before activating a shield of his own. He dances toward the Defender, firing another volley of lasers that he can’t deflect, still frozen solid in Viktor’s trap. He follows it up by commanding a battery of drones to rain lightning down on him–Viktor’s trump card, never-before-tested.
It works. Possibly too well. He watches his enemy’s spine twitch and seize as raw magical energy courses through him, and briefly wonders if he’s overdone it. When the gravity releases him he hits the ground with an unceremonious thump. Splayed out in the prone position, Viktor catches sight of the Defender’s injured hand for the first time. He’s severed the last two metacarpals. It would seem Jayce would be matching his mother from now on.
He steps on the small of the Defender’s back with his augmented leg, pressing down until he feels armor give way beneath his strength. Power courses through him like a panacea when he sees soft brown eyes bulge in terror.
“We are not friends, Defender. You try to annihilate me for months, destroy my work, kill my patients, and you expect me to be gentle as a kitten because you shed a few tears for a man you once knew?” He grinds his foot in until Jayce lets out a cry. “Expect me to be civil when you are a lapdog for the very people who stole and corrupted everything we worked for? Don’t make me laugh.”
“Viktor…stop. Please.”
He scoffs, bending down to retrieve the Defender’s hammer. He plucks the gemstone like a rotted eyeball from its socket, pocketing it. Maybe this time he’ll be able to save some with it, the endless conveyor of bodies fueling Piltover and Zaun’s bloody war. The desperate fathers, mothers, wives, children, who pound at his door, begging him to save them, to do anything . The countless crushed legs or arms he’s removed and augmented. Hit by large, blunt force objects, the bones beneath shattered beyond human recognition. Maybe Jayce. Maybe one of his friends. Almost certainly with technology that Viktor helped create. Weapons that he never intended.
He eases his foot off of Jayce’s back, watches as the man heaves in breaths of polluted air, then walks past him to retrieve his mask. He’s done here.
“Next time I may not be so kind, Defender.”
“Wait,” Jayce wheezes.
There’s no reason to do so, but he pauses anyway.
“You said I…killed your patients. I’d never…”
Anger flares through him as fresh as the day it happened. He presses the inhibitor again, then faces him to calmly reply, “When you raided my lab three weeks ago, destroyed my equipment and ran off with my crystal. You killed 12 people whose life support was dependent on it.”
Jayce pushes himself in a sitting position, face growing indignant as he mulls over Viktor’s words. “I…they couldn’t have been. Those were corpses. They had their brains exposed. You were…you were experimenting on them!”
“They were as alive as you or me until you arrived, hero ,” he sneers, just to watch Jayce’s face fall.
“...I didn’t know,” his gaze finds Viktor’s and he wonders if they’re just talking about the bodies anymore, “I didn’t know. I promise you that, Viktor.”
His metal body vents exhaust like a sigh. Jayce was a weakness of his that, despite his best efforts, he couldn’t remove. He was his own sort of disease, one that had wormed its way into Viktor’s body long ago through sleepless nights spent in a lab and stolen presses of hurried lips. He’s not that man anymore. But he summons him anyway, a gentle ghost who presses a bracelet into Jayce’s palm and whispers not to ask for permission.
“And now you do. So, what will you do with it?”
“You…you’ve killed too many people, Viktor.”
“So have you.”
Jayce pushes himself to his feet, grasping for his hammer before realizing Viktor has rendered it a useless hunk of metal. He sighs, pushing it to the side and all but collapses against building wreckage. He looks…older than Viktor remembers. There’s a touch of silver coming in at his temples. Premature stress aging? Or had he always been destined for a salt-and-pepper mid 30s? Viktor’s unsure, he’s never so much as seen as a picture of Jayce’s father. There are bags under his bloodshot eyes. He looks much smaller than the man Viktor has been fighting for months.
“I don’t want to fight you.”
“You keep saying that.”
Viktor is a smart man. It’s something–perhaps the only thing–he’s prided himself on since he was very small, the indisputable fact of his cleverness. But a man with even half the wits as him would have shot Jayce through the heart the moment he made himself vulnerable–weaponless!--his armor cracked and all but useless, and baring himself to Viktor all the same. And still he hesitates.
“So can’t we just…stop?”
The Machine Herald sighs and puts on his mask.
“No, Jayce, I don’t believe we can.”
He leaves him there, against the wall, ignoring his cries of protest with the press of a button. He tries not to think of what will happen if he’s found by Jinx or the Firelights. Jayce was the one who insisted on baring his face (the one on every other airship in town) on the battlefield. He’s not Viktor’s problem anymore.
And, besides, it’s the Promenade; someone would be along to collect him sooner or later, Sheriff Caitlyn or her guard dog Vi.
He walks, past the Lanes and down into the Entresol, where the sagging remains of his childhood home wait to envelope him like a hug. His back is killing him by the time he steps past the threshold into the cold, quiet house, and all but collapses onto what once was his mother’s workbench. His leg, the metal one, seizes with a phantom ache. He rubs absently at the joints like he used to when it was flesh out of habit.
It hits him all at once. Jayce hadn’t known. He had thought he was dead. It didn’t–shouldn’t–matter, and yet, there was a distinctness to it that he couldn’t quite parse. All the anger hadn’t been meant for him. It left a rotten taste in his mouth, past the secretions of his mechanical lungs.
A sudden banging on his door knocks him out of his thoughts.
“Machine Herald, Machine Herald please, there’s been an explosion, the topsiders bombed a Chemplant–”
There was no use ruminating about the past. The actions they had taken had already been set into motion. Viktor had made his choice. So had Jayce. Viktor presses his inhibitor once more and forces himself past the pain and onto his feet.
There was still work to be done.